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I often run browsers over ssh and I really hope this "draw programs like a game engine" stuff doesn't catch on. This is already the approach taken by Chrome (t

by okasaki 11y ago

I often run browsers over ssh and I really hope this "draw programs like a game engine" stuff doesn't catch on. This is already the approach taken by Chrome (trace Chrome and you'll just see a bunch of full window resolution PutImage calls), and it's very slow over the network, I get around 1 fps. Firefox on the other hand uses more X11 calls, and it's much more responsive, close to running it locally.

comex 11y ago
I'd call this more a gap in modern remoting functionality on Linux than anything else. With the prevalence of hardware encoding and decoding, there is little reason not to just send H.264 (or your choice of video codec) over the network. Not (just) to compensate for the kind of issue you mention, but also because it allows animations, videos, games, etc. to work over the network, and is likely to compress better than X11 anyway. Actually, I believe NX already does this in the latest (proprietary) version, though I don't use it.
- vidarh 11y ago
  XPRA supports various encodings like this: http://xpra.org/ http://xpra.org/ But video codecs does not give the same experience as running apps that are actually written to take some care about what/how it updates. Not least because the artefacts when they can't keep up are less consistent with what I at least expect from a desktop environment.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- tedunangst 11y ago
  Apart from the fact that if nothing changes, it shouldn't send anything. I don't feel like burning 100k/s in data just to receive a pixelated image that doesn't change.
pjmlp 11y ago
RDP doesn't have any issue doing remote DirectX rendering. Just as mentioned in the sibling post, X11 isn't up the task for modern graphics. EDIT: lots of typos
acdha 11y ago
If you care about performance, why not run Firefox/Chrome locally using SSH's dynamic proxy mode? The slight hit in network latency should be much lower than the benefit of doing all of the decoding & rendering locally.
pcwalton 11y ago
> Firefox on the other hand uses more X11 calls, and it's much more responsive, close to running it locally. I guess this is referring to XRender. XRender might well be the right approach in theory. Unfortunately, XRender is pretty much a failed experiment as far as browsers are concerned. There was a lot of noise in the Linux community demanding its use, which is why it went into Firefox. But ultimately what people want is fast vector graphics in practice, which you can only get by tightly controlling the vector graphics stack. The reality on the ground is that you can't trust the X server to do vector graphics efficiently. The X11-remoting use case is a tiny, tiny niche that unfortunately simply isn't worth optimizing for, especially with Wayland around the corner.

by okasaki 11y ago

comex 11y ago

I'd call this more a gap in modern remoting functionality on Linux than anything else. With the prevalence of hardware encoding and decoding, there is little reason not to just send H.264 (or your choice of video codec) over the network. Not (just) to compensate for the kind of issue you mention, but also because it allows animations, videos, games, etc. to work over the network, and is likely to compress better than X11 anyway. Actually, I believe NX already does this in the latest (proprietary) version, though I don't use it.

vidarh 11y ago
XPRA supports various encodings like this: http://xpra.org/ http://xpra.org/ But video codecs does not give the same experience as running apps that are actually written to take some care about what/how it updates. Not least because the artefacts when they can't keep up are less consistent with what I at least expect from a desktop environment.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tedunangst 11y ago
Apart from the fact that if nothing changes, it shouldn't send anything. I don't feel like burning 100k/s in data just to receive a pixelated image that doesn't change.

pjmlp 11y ago

RDP doesn't have any issue doing remote DirectX rendering. Just as mentioned in the sibling post, X11 isn't up the task for modern graphics. EDIT: lots of typos

acdha 11y ago

If you care about performance, why not run Firefox/Chrome locally using SSH's dynamic proxy mode? The slight hit in network latency should be much lower than the benefit of doing all of the decoding & rendering locally.

pcwalton 11y ago

> Firefox on the other hand uses more X11 calls, and it's much more responsive, close to running it locally. I guess this is referring to XRender. XRender might well be the right approach in theory. Unfortunately, XRender is pretty much a failed experiment as far as browsers are concerned. There was a lot of noise in the Linux community demanding its use, which is why it went into Firefox. But ultimately what people want is fast vector graphics in practice, which you can only get by tightly controlling the vector graphics stack. The reality on the ground is that you can't trust the X server to do vector graphics efficiently. The X11-remoting use case is a tiny, tiny niche that unfortunately simply isn't worth optimizing for, especially with Wayland around the corner.